One of the pioneers of the ultramobile PC, OQO, will likely retool itself to address vertical business applications, the company's new chief executive said late Monday.

Jay Shiveley, who most recently served as managing director of venture-capital fund VantagePoint Venture Partners, was officially named to run the company on Monday after serving in an unofficial capacity for several days.

In an interview, Shively said OQO has weathered its startup phase, but needs to develop a core market to move forward. OQO plans to identify several vertical enterprise markets and applications and transform its miniature PC into a business tool, he added, adding that the recent announcements of Microsoft's "Origami" project had given its efforts extra weight.

Shiveley's decision comes as Microsoft and its launch partner, Samsung, roll out the Origami ultramobile PC for the consumer market. Critics have characterized the concept as merely a retooled TabletPC, while analysts say its success will depend on features as well as price.

But Origami's path is a trail that OQO has already broken. Shiveley praised the efforts to develop the "Model 01+," the company's second iteration of a small, wallet-sized PC that can run a full-fledged version of Windows XP. The 14-ounce PC, complete with 5-inch WVGA display, 512 Mbytes of RAM, a 30-Gbyte hard drive, and a 1-GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor can run either Windows XP or Microsoft's TabletPC OS. The device also includes a built-in keyboard.

The miniature PC was the end result of a successful design phase and relationships with several suppliers, Shiveley said.

"Would I have liked [OQO] to have a full-fledged sales force, that sold millions of units? Sure. But that hasn't happened, the same as it hasn't happened with other young companies," Shiveley said. "There hasn't been anything holding it back."

That said, Shiveley also referred to a "gap" that has to be addressed: "Who, what, where, why  who are you, what are you, where do you sell, why do you sell to someone and not someone else," he said.

Shiveley said that OQO exists at the intersection of the laptop market, which sells tens of millions of units per year, and devices like Research In Motion's BlackBerry, which caters to a specific subset of the business market. One of OQO's core strengths is its ability to provide a full-fledged Windows XP experience in a small form factor, and the company's challenge is to translate that into a core group of customers, he said.

"We are all about going and taking a specific business application and process, inside of a flexible moving environment, whatever application is driven by full-blown Windows XP," Shiveley said.

OQO's enterprise page already identifies several target markets, including healthcare, sales, and manufacturing. Shiveley said the company would probably pare those to two or three sectors, figure out the four or five critical applications, and develop the market over a twelve-month period. The company's goal is to scrape off two million or so units from the laptop market and redirect them toward the Model 01+ or subsequent products, and pushing down the price of the device through the increased sales volume. Shiveley hinted that his company would be working "much more closely" with Intel down the road, possibly signalling a change in microprocessor suppliers.

"I don't even know if we can grow this company fast enough to keep up with that," Shiveley said.

However, Microsoft's efforts to develop the Origami UltraMobile PC will help OQO, Shiveley said. "When the big boys start to blow air into the balloon, it starts to get big fast," he said.

But Microsoft is also focused on the wrong market, Shiveley added. "It may be self-preserving for Microsoft to be going after the consumer market with a simplistic device" that looks like a PDA, he said. "Business applications need a laptop-style environment, with a keyboard, and that's a fact."

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